Jeremy Corbyn has made his party safer for antisemites than for Jews

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” That was Jeremy Corbyn’s take on Twitter in January 2017, when Theresa May refused to condemn Donald Trump’s Muslim ban. It’s a tweet that has come back to haunt him recently. Read more: Labour MPs split over anti-Semitism hearing Last month, the Labour leader exercised his neutrality as his party redrafted the official description of antisemitism in its code of conduct, removing key examples from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition. When this was criticised, he remained neutral while listening to his old friend Peter Willsman, a Momentum activist and member of Labour’s National Executive Committee, ranting about how the party’s antisemitism problem was down to smears from “Jewish Trump fanatics”. And, it emerged on Wednesday, he was neutral during an event he himself hosted in parliament on Holocaust Memorial Day in 2010, at which a speaker – Corbyn’s guest – compared Israel to the Nazis. Corbyn’s response to the revelations about the 2010 event is just 77 words long, yet resembles a minefield of weasel words. “Views were expressed at the meeting which I do not accept or condone,” he says passively, which is quite a linguistic step away from “I denounce the views expressed at the meeting”. “I have on occasion appeared on platforms with people whose views I completely reject,” he continues, which neither explicitly condemns the view in question (that Israel is comparable to Nazism), nor mentions that he has… [Read full story]